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Reading BackwaRds

edited By MuiReann MaguiRe and tiMothy Langen

Reading Backwards

This is the author-approved edition of this Open Access title. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher’s website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com

Cover image: Nadezhda Udaltsova, Mashinistka (1910s). Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N._Udaltsova_-_Typewriter_girl,_1910s.jpg, Public Domain. Cover Design by Anna Gatti.

edited By MuiReann MaguiRe and tiMothy Langen

An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature

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An Advance Retrospective on Russian LiteratureThis book outlines with theoretical and literary historical rigor a highly innovative approach to the writing of

Russian literary history and to the reading of canonical Russian texts.

—William Mills Todd III, Harvard University

Russian authors […] were able to draw their ideas from their predecessors, but also from their successors, testifying to the open-mindedness that characterizes the Slavic soul. This book restores the truth.

—Pierre Bayard, University of Paris 8

This edited volume employs the paradoxical notion of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’—developed in the 1960s by the ‘Oulipo’ group of French writers and thinkers—as a mode for reading Russian literature. Reversing established critical approaches to the canon and literary influence, its contributors ask us to consider how reading against linear chronologies can elicit fascinating new patterns and perspectives.

Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature re-assesses three major nineteenth-century authors—Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy—either in terms of previous writers and artists who plagiarized them (such as Raphael, Homer, or Hall Caine), or of their own depredations against later writers (from J.M. Coetzee to Liudmila Petrushevskaia).

Far from suggesting that past authors literally stole from their descendants, these engaging essays, contributed by both early-career and senior scholars of Russian and comparative literature, encourage us to identify the contingent and familiar within classic texts. By moving beyond rigid notions of cultural heritage and literary canons, they demonstrate that inspiration is cyclical, influence can flow in multiple directions, and no idea is ever truly original.

This book will be of great value to literary scholars and students working in Russian Studies. The introductory discussion of the origins and context of ‘plagiarism by anticipation’, alongside varied applications of the concept, will also be of interest to those working in the wider fields of comparative literature, reception studies, and translation studies.

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https://www.openbookpublishers.com© 2021 Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen. Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapter’s author.

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Muireann Maguire and Timothy Langen (eds), Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0241

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ISBN Paperback: 9781800641198ISBN Hardback: 9781800641204ISBN Digital (PDF): 9781800641211 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 9781800641228ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 9781800641235ISBN Digital (XML): 9781800641242DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0241

Cover image: Nadezhda Udaltsova, Mashinistka (1910s). Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N._Udaltsova_-_Typewriter_girl,_1910s.jpg, Public Domain.

Cover Design by Anna Gatti.

7. The Posteriority of the Anterior: Levinas, Tolstoy, and

Responsibility for the OtherSteven Shankman

‘The Russian novelists’, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) remarked, ‘ceaselessly wonder about the philosophical problem understood as the meaning of the human, as the search for the famous “meaning of life”.’1 While literary scholars have written extensively about Dostoevsky and Levinas, relatively little has been said of how powerfully the fiction of Tolstoy anticipates key aspects of Levinas’s philosophical thought.2 The chief preoccupations of Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité, 1961) and Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence (Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence, 1974) correspond to the two phases of Tolstoy’s literary career as a novelist. In the first phase, War and Peace (Voina i mir, 1869) anticipates what Levinas means by his pairing of totality with war and of infinity with peace. Indeed, both authors, as young military officers, experienced the horrors of war first-hand, Tolstoy in the Crimean War and Levinas in World War II. In the second phase, beginning with Anna Karenina (1878) and culminating in his late novel Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1899), Tolstoy understands religion, or the word God, as bearing witness, above all, to ethical obligation. Tolstoy’s critical portrait of the dogmatic Christian believer Aleksei Aleksandrovich Karenin is a bridge between these two phases of Tolstoy’s literary career.

Our volume of essays has been inspired by the concept of ‘anticipatory plagiarism’, a notion that defies logic. How can an author plagiarize a

© 2021 Steven Shankman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0241.07

160 Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature

text from a later time period? How, more generally, can the after influence the before, the posterior the anterior? Yet the influence of the posterior on the anterior is precisely Levinas’s claim in a key passage from the early pages of Totality and Infinity in which he describes the necessary separation of the subject from totality lest that totality swallow up—i.e. assimilate—that subject. ‘The posteriority of the anterior’, Levinas writes, is ‘an inversion’ that is ‘logically absurd’. In what Levinas calls the interiority of the separated subject, ‘the After or the Effect conditions the Before or the Cause.’3

Let us now try to unpack Levinas’s rather dense articulation of anterior posteriority in this passage. I think now, in the present. All thought happens in the present, even the thought that thinks of a before that precedes the present, and that conditions the present. In the famous Cartesian articulation, I think, and therefore I am: cogito, ergo sum. Thought proceeds from the cogito. As Descartes discovers in his Third Meditation, however, in chronological time, in the time of thinking, this very cogito discovers that it does not, in fact, proceed from itself. The cogito discovers this when it thinks the idea of infinity, an idea which, Descartes posits, cannot originate in the cogito, because that cogito is finite. The finite cannot contain the infinite. Its source must therefore be infinite; must, in fact, be God, the infinite being, who put this idea into my consciousness, which is finite. ‘The being infinitely surpassing its own idea in us—God in the Cartesian terminology’, Levinas writes, ‘subtends [sous-tend]’ or underlies ‘the evidence of the cogito’.4 What was posterior, what emerged in the chronological time of thinking, is now understood—in the time of thought—to have preceded thought, to be anterior to thought. As William Large explains this phenomenon, ‘[w]hat comes first in terms of the exposition is second in terms of the condition.’5 In the course of reading Descartes’ Third Meditation (Méditation troisième, 1641), in the time of our reading, we come to learn that subjectivity, in Large’s words, ‘is in fact dependent on the existence of God. In the same way’, Large continues, ‘although Levinas [in Totality and Infinity] first of all describes the separate existence of the self, we later discover that without the relation to the other, this existence would not have been possible.’6

It is logically absurd that Tolstoy could have plagiarized Levinas, that the later author could have influenced the earlier one, that the posterior

1617. Levinas, Tolstoy, and Responsibility for the Other

could have conditioned the anterior. But what is not logically absurd—and this is my argument—is that Levinas recognized this logical absurdity, as did Tolstoy. Both Tolstoy and Levinas posit a self that is primordially haunted by the other. Tolstoy articulates and embodies this in his fiction, which in turn had a profound effect on Emmanuel Levinas, who expounds the meaning of the ‘posteriority of the anterior’ in Totality and Infinity.

Totality and Infinity as War and Peace

In the first part of this essay, I shall comment on the first of the two phases of the correspondence between the philosophy of Levinas, the poetic philosopher, and the fiction of Tolstoy, the philosophical poet. Levinas’s Totality and Infinity is a philosophical meditation—evoking Tolstoy’s War and Peace—on war as totality and peace as infinity. In War and Peace, Tolstoy sees war as a grimly anonymous totality that is, stunningly, ruptured by the face of the other. For Levinas, inspired by Tolstoy, peace is produced when I, breaking the ‘anonymous utterance of history’, see, and address, the face of the other; and when, in seeing and responding to the face, I break ‘with the totality of wars and empires in which one does not speak’.7 Thus for both Tolstoy and Levinas, ‘ethics’, as Levinas puts it in the preface to Totality and Infinity, ‘is an optics’: or, ‘l’éthique est une optique’.8

Levinas makes a number of explicit references to Tolstoy in his writings. He was particularly struck by Prince Andrei’s famously transformative vision, after being wounded on the battlefield at Austerlitz, of the infinite height of the sky.9 In the course of War and Peace, Tolstoy transposes the vertical infinity of physical or cosmic space to the horizontal ethical dimension, namely to the infinity of the other in front of me. The infinity of the far, of the distant, becomes the infinity of the near.

Just after he is badly wounded at Austerlitz, Andrei opens his eyes and sees

nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty. […] How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to find it at last! Yes! All is vanity! All falsehood, except that infinite sky.10

162 Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature

What we see ruptured here is the totality of war understood as the system, the totality in which Andrei had been seeking the meaning of life in glory and fame. The infinity of the sky reveals a beyond of the brutality of war, a beyond of the totalizing system in which Andrei had been immersed.

There had been an absurdity at the very heart of Prince Andrei’s commitment to a military career in the Russian army. His hero was Napoleon, and yet it was against Napoleon that he and his fellow Russians were fighting. When the wounded Prince Andrei now encounters Napoleon beneath this ‘lofty sky’, he sees him as an ‘insignificant’, mean-spirited ‘little’ man.11

Totality and the Face of Vereshchagin

Napoleon’s forces have now invaded Moscow. The Russian General Kutuzov concludes that it is impossible for the Russian army to defend Moscow. Count Rostopchin, governor of Moscow, deeply disagrees with Kutuzov’s decision, but Moscow must be emptied. One of the political prisoners to be evacuated is the young Vereshchagin, who becomes the focus of Rostopchin’s frustrations. When Rostopchin learns from a subordinate that Vereshchagin is among the political prisoners, he angrily shouts, ‘“Vereshchagin! Hasn’t he been hanged yet? […] Bring him to me!”’.12 The face of Vereshchagin makes its appeal to Rostopchin, but in vain. Vereshchagin’s ‘emaciated young face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down hopelessly. At the Count’s first words he [Vereshchagin] raised it slowly and looked up at him as if wishing to say something or at least to meet his eye. But Rostopchin did not look at him’.13 Rostopchin orders that the pitiful young man be turned over to an unruly mob of incensed Muscovites, who beat him to death.

Rostopchin tries to soothe his guilty conscience by maintaining to himself that he had acted for the public good. In deciding to throw Vereshchagin to the mob, Rostopchin tries to excuse himself by saying that he acted not as the private individual Fyodor Vassilievich Rostopchin but rather as a representative of the ruling authorities, including the tsar. ‘“If I were merely Fyodor Vassilievich”’, Rostopchin comments, ‘“ma ligne de conduite aurait été tout autrement tracée [my line of conduct would have been drawn quite differently], but it was my duty to safeguard my life and dignity as commander in chief.”’14

1637. Levinas, Tolstoy, and Responsibility for the Other

Vereshchagin is a prisoner in chains, young, vulnerable. He is thus what Levinas describes as the Stranger, ‘l’absolument Autre’.15 The absolutely Other, Levinas continues,

is the Other human being in front of me [Autrui]. He and I do not form a number. The collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not the plural of the ‘I.’ I, you—these are not individuals of a common concept. Neither possession, nor unity of number nor the unity of concepts link me to the Stranger, the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself. But Stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power. He escapes my grasp by an essential dimension, even if I have him at my disposal. He is not wholly in my site.16

If the Other is truly other, he and I do not, in truth, comprise a totality in which ‘I’ am reduced to a public official and the other to a threat to the public good. The only way to rupture this totality is for the I to see the face of the other and to speak to him. But this is what Rostopchin refuses to do.

The stranger is the one who troubles the being at home with oneself. Over him, Levinas insists, I have no power, even if I have him at my disposal. Just after the mob murders Vereshchagin, Rostopchin, leaving the site of the carnage he had licensed in his carriage, encounters a ‘lunatic’ who has just been released from an asylum as part of the exodus of the Russian population from Moscow ordered in anticipation of Napoleon’s arrival. The ‘gaze’ of this madman—with his ‘solemn, gloomy face […] with its beard growing in uneven tufts’ and his ‘black, agate pupils with saffron-yellow whites’ moving ‘restlessly near the lower eyelids’—was ‘fixed’ on Rostopchin. Rostopchin orders his driver to fly past the madman. Rostopchin then hears ‘the insane despairing screams’ of the madman ‘growing fainter in the distance’. The screams are those of the madman, but Rostopchin’s ‘eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened, bloodstained face’17 of Vereshchagin. Rostopchin is haunted by the face of the stranger whom he has betrayed and over whom, in truth, he has no power.

Rostopchin fails to respond to the face. Some pages later, the notoriously cruel French general Davout, in contrast to Rostopchin, does indeed respond to the face of the other. Pierre and several other Russians, charged with being incendiaries in now French-occupied Moscow, are brought before Davout. Davout accuses Pierre of being a Russian spy. Pierre insists he is not. ‘Davout looked up and gazed

164 Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature

intently at him’, Tolstoy writes. ‘For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre.’18 Unaware that Davout has just decided to pardon him, Pierre imagines that he is being escorted to his death by an anonymous totality. Who, precisely, Pierre wonders,

was executing him, killing him, depriving him of life—him, Pierre, with all his memories, aspirations, hopes, and thoughts? And Pierre felt that it was no one. It was a system—a concurrence of circumstances. A system of some sort was killing him—Pierre—depriving him of life, of everything, annihilating him.19

Pierre is spared execution, but he witnesses the execution of other fellow Russians and, as a result, he ‘felt it was not in his power to regain faith in the meaning of life’.20 Pierre is brought back to life by his encounter with the kindly peasant Platon Karataev.

The Rupture of Totality: Enjoyment

The novel’s protagonist Pierre Bezukhov had, before his capture by the French, consistently found himself in situations which reduced his role to a part in an anonymous drama: a loveless marriage to a shallow and beautiful socialite—a marriage to which he felt fatally and helplessly drawn despite his better instincts. And now, in Moscow, after being seduced by numerology, he is convinced that he is predestined to kill Napoleon and thus to free Russia of this scourge. Pistol in hand, he goes in search of Napoleon through the streets of Moscow. But rather than acting as a pawn of his imagined fate (killing Napoleon), Pierre finds himself responding to the face of the other in front of him: he saves the French officer Ramballe and then goes on to rescue, at great personal risk, a young girl from the flames of her burning house.

Levinas is known as the philosopher of the ethical relation, of the I who is called into question by the other in front of me. We have just seen how Pierre experiences and exemplifies precisely this transcendence of the I towards the other. What is often not sufficiently appreciated about the work of Levinas, and about Totality and Infinity in particular, is that, while Levinas compellingly shows how totality is ruptured by my response to the face, by my responsibility for the other, the I, even before its being called into question by the other, escapes totality through enjoyment. The I, for Levinas, is what in Totality and Infinity he calls a

1657. Levinas, Tolstoy, and Responsibility for the Other

psychism with its own interiority.21 The self has an active existence. It lives in enjoyment, already outside of history and of any totality.

Pierre makes this discovery, remarkably, while in captivity in Moscow. Prince Andrei, Pierre reflects while in prison, ‘had thought and said that happiness could only be negative […] as though all desire for positive happiness is implanted in us merely to torment us and never be satisfied.’ For Pierre, however, ‘the satisfaction of one’s needs and consequent freedom in the choice of one’s way of life, now seemed to be indubitably man’s highest happiness.’ Pierre continues:

Here and now for the first time he fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating when he wanted to eat, drinking when he wanted to drink, sleeping when he wanted to sleep, of warmth when he was cold, of talking to a fellow man when he wished to talk and hear a human voice. The satisfaction of one’s needs–good food, cleanliness, and freedom–now […] seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness […] and for the rest of his life, he thought and spoke with enthusiasm of that month of captivity, of those irrecoverable, strong, joyful sensations, and chiefly of the […] inner freedom which he experienced only during those months.22

As Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, ‘[t]he imprisoned being, ignoring its prison, is at home with itself.’23 Pierre soon finds his separation from totality, his interiority, his enjoyment, his psychism threatened by the anonymous totality that is war. Just as Pierre was speaking to a French corporal about what could be done to assist a very sick Russian soldier, Tolstoy writes, ‘the sharp rattle of the drums on two sides drowned out the sick man’s groans.’ Tolstoy continues: ‘“There it is! … It again!” [‘Vot ono!.. Opiat’ ono!’] said Pierre to himself, and an involuntary shudder ran down his spine.’ Having experienced himself in prison as an independent being, Pierre now once again feels ‘that fatal force which had crushed him during the executions, but which he had not felt during his imprisonment’. This force was ‘terrible,’ Pierre remarks, but he now feels that ‘there grew and strengthened in his soul a power of life independent of it’.24

That evening, Pierre is sitting by the campfire and enjoying conversation with his fellow prisoners. He decides he wants to cross the road to visit with the ‘common soldier prisoners’. On the road a French sentinel orders him back to the side of the road which he has just crossed. Before he rejoins his ‘companions by the campfire’, he stops, thinks, and laughs loudly as he rejoices in the recognition of his separation from the

166 Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature

totality that is war, of the joyful independence of his being, what Levinas would call his psychism:

‘Ha-ha-ha!’ laughed Pierre. And he said aloud to himself: ‘The soldier did not let me pass. They took me and shut me up. They hold me captive. What, me? Me? My immortal soul? Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!...’ and he laughed till tears started to his eyes. […] Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its faraway depths. ‘And all that is mine, all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!’ thought Pierre.25

As Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, the essence of enjoyment is ‘the transmutation of the other into the same: […] an energy that is other, recognized as other, recognized […] as sustaining the very act that is directed upon it, becomes, in enjoyment, my own energy, my strength, me’.26

Infinity and the Face of Karataev

In Totality and Infinity, Levinas speaks of how the self, before taking responsibility for the other, enjoys his spontaneous freedom. When confronted with the other, I sense a prior responsibility that this spontaneity had in fact betrayed. The other calls this spontaneity into question. It is not necessarily a pleasant experience! It is, rather, a shameful one. Pierre, after experiencing the happiness of his freedom while imprisoned in the shed, on his march with the other prisoners from that location was loath to see and hear how the French army under whose authority he was travelling ‘shot the prisoners who lagged behind, though more than a hundred perished in that way’. Nor did he ‘think of Karataev, who grew weaker every day and evidently would soon have to share that fate’.27 One evening, just after midnight, ‘Pierre reached the fire and heard Platon’s voice enfeebled by illness, and saw his pathetic face brightly lit up by the blaze’. Pierre feels ‘a painful prick at his heart. His feeling of pity for this man frightened him, and he wished to go away, but there was no other fire, and Pierre sat down, trying not to look at Platon’.28 Similarly, just before Karataev is shot by his captors, the kindly Karataev looks at Pierre, but Pierre ‘was too afraid for himself’29 and, pretending that he did not see Karataev look at him, Pierre ‘moved hastily away’.30

1677. Levinas, Tolstoy, and Responsibility for the Other

It was largely his encounter with the kindness of Platon Karataev that brought Pierre back from a state of despair after he had witnessed the pitiful and pointless execution of his fellow Russian prisoners. The narrative proper of War and Peace ends with a paean to Karataev and what he meant to Pierre, the novel’s protagonist, and what he continues to mean to him after he returns from his war-time experiences, marries Natasha, becomes a parent and begins family life.

Tolstoy’s description of Pierre’s discovery of faith in this concluding section of the narrative of War and Peace consists in Pierre’s seeing, in Karataev, the witness of someone who is devoted ‘to love life in one’s suffering, in innocent sufferings’.31 The infinity that, earlier in the novel, Tolstoy associates with the height of the sky here finds its locus in the near, which Pierre had previously dismissed as mere commonplace. In his captivity, Tolstoy writes, Pierre had learned that ‘in Karataev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons’. Tolstoy continues:

He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.32

In what ways is God greater, more infinite and unfathomable in Karataev than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons? As a moral example, surely, of an innocent suffering that bears witness, nonetheless, to the joy of living. But for Pierre the memory of Karataev also brings vividly to mind a responsibility for the other, for the stranger, that Pierre had, to his shame, tried to shirk, to ignore—regardless of the fact that, for his own survival at that point in the narrative of War and Peace, it was arguably necessary for Pierre to ignore that crippling sense of shame. Tolstoy, through his portrayal of Prince Nekhliudov, the protagonist of his last novel Resurrection, will go on to fully confront this sense of shame that goes ignored or repressed in the perhaps somewhat smug happy ending of War and Peace. Pierre, just before that happy ending, recalls his encounter with Karataev as an encounter with what Levinas refers to as ‘the Most-High’. ‘[T]his height is’, however, ‘no longer’ found in ‘the sky [le ciel]’. It is rather in the infinity I encounter in the face of the other in front of me, an infinite responsibility that is,

168 Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature

for Levinas and increasingly for Tolstoy, ‘the very elevation of height and its nobility.’ 33

Religion, Faith, and the Resistance to Vulnerability in Anna Karenina

In War and Peace, Tolstoy anticipates what Levinas means by his pairing of totality with war and of infinity with peace. In Anna Karenina and culminating in his late novel Resurrection, Tolstoy understands religion as bearing witness, above all, to ethical obligation, as does Levinas in his late work. Tolstoy’s critical portrait of the dogmatic Christian believer Aleksei Aleksandrovich Karenin, Anna’s husband, whom she leaves for the other Aleksei, the dashing Count Aleksei Kirillich Vronskii, can be seen as a bridge between these two phases of Tolstoy’s literary career. In this section, I will show how Karenin sacrifices Anna’s otherness to a notion of religious belief that is divorced from ethics, a notion of religion that Emmanuel Levinas labels as ‘primitive’: ‘Everything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relation’, he writes in Totality and Infinity, ‘represents not the superior, but rather the forever primitive, form of religion.’34 Karenin’s dogmatic understanding of Christianity, his determined resistance to vulnerability, makes it impossible for him to hear Anna’s voice, to see her face, to register her otherness, her alterity. Tolstoy’s critique of conventional religious belief as a refusal of vulnerability is sounded again and again throughout the remainder of his career as a writer and thinker.

Before we turn to Karenin’s refusal of vulnerability, let us look at two passages from Levinas about vulnerability, a term that is central to his late work. The first is from an interview that is included in Of God Who Comes to Mind (De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, 1982):

The Bible is the priority of the other [l’autre] in relation to me. It is in the other [l’autrui] that I always see the widow and the orphan. The other [autrui] always comes first. This is what I have called, in Greek language, the dissymmetry of the interpersonal relationship. If there is not this dissymmetry, then no line of what I have written can hold. And this is vulnerability. Only a vulnerable I can love his neighbor [italics added].35

1697. Levinas, Tolstoy, and Responsibility for the Other

The second is from Levinas’s account of sensibility in Otherwise than Being:

Exposure as a sensibility is […] like an inversion of the conatus of esse, a not finding any protection in any consistency or identity of a state. It is a having been offered without any holding back and not the generosity of offering oneself, which would be an act. […] In the having been offered without any holding back, it is as though sensibility were precisely what all protection and all absence of protection already presuppose: vulnerability itself. 36

Levinas insists that I can love my neighbour only when I find no protection in identity, when I am vulnerable.

It is not as if the spiritually flat, unimaginative bureaucrat Karenin is incapable of vulnerability. He is in fact deeply vulnerable, but—perhaps because he was brought up as an orphan,37 adopted by an uncle who was a bureaucrat, and as a young child was deprived of maternal love—he is terrified by his own vulnerability. As Tolstoy informs us,

None but those closest to Karenin knew that this to all appearances supremely cold and sensible man had one weakness that contradicted his general cast of character. Karenin could not bear to hear or see the tears of a child or a woman. The sight of tears put him in a state of great distress, and he lost the ability to think. His head clerk and secretary knew this and forewarned lady petitioners that they were by no means to cry if they did not want to spoil their case. ‘He will get angry and will not listen to you,’ they would say. Indeed, in those instances, the emotional distress produced in Alexei Alexandrovich by tears was expressed in impatient fury. ‘There is nothing I can do, nothing. Would you kindly get out!’ he would shout in those instances.38

Karenin considers himself a believer, a religious man. Religion, for him, however, is a mere matter of rules. As Tolstoy comments, Karenin ‘was a believer interested in religion primarily in its political sense’.39 His embrace of religion in a political rather than in an ethical sense is precisely the opposite of how Levinas, in Totality and Infinity, understands religion:

For the relation between the being here below and the transcendent being that results in no community or concept or totality—a relation without relation—we reserve the term religion.40

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In a remarkable passage early in the novel, Tolstoy shows how Karenin is utterly incapable of encountering his wife Anna from a “religious” perspective, in Levinas’s sense of the word “religious”, i.e. as absolutely other than himself. Karenin now has good reason to suspect Anna of infidelity. As he prepares to confront Anna in their home in St Petersburg, before she returns from a tryst with Vronskii, he enters her sitting room and looks at her things. He and Anna have been married for eight years, but it is here, for the very first time, that he finally recognizes that Anna has an existence separate from his own. This extraordinary passage is worth quoting at length:

Here, looking at her desk with the malachite blotter lying on top and a note she had started, his thoughts suddenly changed. He began thinking about her, about what she thought and felt. For the first time he vividly imagined her private life, her thoughts, her desires, and the thought that she might and must have her own separate life seemed to him so terrible that he hastened to drive it away. This was the abyss into which he was afraid to look. Trying to imagine the thoughts and feelings of another being was an emotional exercise alien to Alexei Alexandrovich. He considered this emotional exercise harmful and dangerous fantasizing.

‘What is most horrible of all,’ he thought, ‘is that now, as my work is drawing to its conclusion’—he was thinking about the project he was overseeing now—‘when I need all the tranquility and strength I can muster, now I am being inundated with this senseless worry. What else can I do, though? I’m not one of those people who suffers upset and alarm and lacks the strength to look them in the face.’

‘I must think this through, come to a decision, and set it aside,’ he said out loud.

‘Questions of her feelings, of what has and might come to pass in her soul, that is none of my affair, it is the affair of her conscience and falls under religion,’ he told himself, feeling relief at the awareness that he had found the established formal category [punkt uzakonenii] under which the newly arisen circumstances rightly fell.41

Karenin refuses to see his part in his failed marriage. He takes no responsibility for Anna’s unhappiness, which drove her towards her liaison with Vronskii, whose aggressive advances she at first staunchly resists. Karenin characterizes Anna as

‘Without honor, heart, or religion. […] I made a mistake in linking my life with her; however, there is nothing bad in my mistake, and so I cannot be

1717. Levinas, Tolstoy, and Responsibility for the Other

unhappy. It’s not I who am to blame [Vinovat ne ia],’ he told himself, ‘it’s she. But she’s no business of mine. For me, she doesn’t exist.’42

In Dostoevsky’s 1881 novel The Brothers Karamazov (Brat’ia Karamazovy), the jury renders its guilty verdict against Dmitrii Karamazov with the word vinovat (‘guilty’). Dmitrii is not technically guilty of his father’s murder, but he is certainly responsible (vinovat), in no small measure, for his disciple and bastard half-brother Smerdiakov’s crime. Karenin, unlike Dmitrii Karamazov, refuses to take responsibility for a crime (for Karenin, adultery rather than parricide) that he did not technically commit, but for which he is nevertheless in large part responsible. Note that, in the quotation cited above, Karenin explicitly says that he is not ‘responsible’ (vinovat) for Anna’s adulterous affair.

Karenin comes closer to a embracing a truly religious attitude—to embracing vulnerability—at Anna’s bedside when, in attempting to give birth to the child she conceived with Vronskii, she is perilously close to dying. In response to Anna’s desperate urging, Karenin forgives Vronskii:

At his ill wife’s bedside, for the first time in his life, he surrendered to the warm compassion which other people’s suffering evoked in him and which had previously embarrassed him as a harmful weakness; and his pity for her, and remorse for having wished her death, and, most of all, the very joy of forgiveness made him feel not only relief from his sufferings but also a spiritual peace he had never before experienced. He suddenly felt that the very thing that had been the source of his sufferings had become the source of his spiritual joy; that what had seemed insoluble when he had condemned, reproached, and hated became simple and clear when he forgave and loved.43

Forgiving Vronskii is not sufficient, however. In order to truly save Anna, to allow Anna her absolute otherness, Karenin must be willing to agree to a divorce. A divorce can be granted, according to the male-centred laws of the time, only if the husband admits to being at fault, i.e. to being the adulterer. Anna, however, is the adulterous party, so Karenin must take the blame in spite of his (technical) innocence. He agrees to do so, but more as a martyr than as someone who truly takes responsibility for his part in his failed marriage. Karenin at first agrees to permit Anna to divorce him, but even in this consent we can already sense that his transcendence before Anna is not quite transcendent

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enough, for he finally balks and refuses the divorce. We sense this failure of transcendence in his response to Anna’s brother, Stiva Oblonskii, who comes to see Karenin to plead, on Anna’s behalf, for the divorce.

‘Yes, yes!’ Karenin exclaimed in a shrill voice, ‘I will take the disgrace upon myself and even give up my son, but ... but wouldn’t it be better to leave it be? But do what you like.’

Turning away from his brother-in-law, so that he could not see him, he sat in the chair by the window. It was a bitter and shameful thing for him; but along with this grief and shame he was experiencing joy and tenderness at the loftiness of his own humility [pred svoei vysotoi smireniia].44

As we have noted, Levinas (in Otherwise than Being) says that vulnerability ‘is a having been offered without any holding back and not the generosity of offering oneself, which would be an act’.45 Karenin’s experience of ‘joy and tenderness at the loftiness of his own humility’ bears ironic witness to the incompleteness of his transcendence before the face of Anna. Tolstoy is here subtly but clearly mocking Karenin’s exalted sense of his own humility, of his own generosity, of which he is abundantly and proudly conscious. Hardly true humility, or true vulnerability!

Karenin recants his generous offer of divorce under the influence of his socialite friend Lidiia Ivanovna, who introduces Karenin to the cult of an emotive “spiritualism” that was the rage in Petersburg high society at the time, and who despises Anna. ‘[F]rom an indifferent and lazy believer’, Lidiia Ivanovna turns Karenin

into an ardent and firm supporter of that new interpretation of the Christian doctrine which had spread of late in Petersburg. Alexei Alexandrovich was easily convinced of this. […] He saw nothing impossible or incompatible in that notion that death, which exists for nonbelievers, did not exist for him, and that since he possessed the fullest faith […] then there was no sin in his soul now, and he was already experiencing complete salvation here, on earth. […] Alexei Alexandrovich needed so much to think this way, so needed in his humiliation to have that loftiness, however fabricated, from which he, despised by all, might despise others, that he clung to this salvation, this mock salvation.46

For the spiritualists, ‘faith’ counts for more than ‘works’. In fact, for the believing spiritualist to attain salvation, ‘works’ mean nothing at all. ‘For

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the believer, there is no sin’, Lidiia Ivanovna remarks at a spiritualist séance to which she has invited Stiva Oblonskii in order to introduce him to the charlatan who will seal Anna’s fate by proclaiming, after allegedly consulting spirits, that Karenin must refuse the divorce. ‘Yes, but faith without works is dead’, Stiva remarks, remembering this phrase from the catechism, to which Karenin replies:

‘There it is, from the Epistle of James the Apostle,’ said Alexei Alexandrovich, turning to Lydia Ivanovna with a certain reproach, evidently about a topic they had already spoken of more than once. ‘How much harm the false interpretation of this passage has done! Nothing so repels a man from faith as this interpretation. “I have no works, I cannot believe,” since nowhere is this said. What is said is the opposite.’47

Karenin, in the end, anchors his religious faith in a resistance to vulnerability. I will conclude this second section by contrasting the believer Karenin, whose Christianity has cut itself off from a vulnerable love of the neighbour, with the nonbeliever Levin, with whose epiphany the novel ends. I began by citing Levinas’s comment that ‘only a vulnerable I can love his neighbor’.48 Levin’s wife Kitty, herself a believer, has never been bothered by her husband’s unbelief. For Kitty, Levin’s actions speak for themselves:

What kind of nonbeliever is he? With his heart and his fear of disappointing anyone, even a child! Everything for others, and nothing for himself. […] All these peasants who come to see him every day, as if he were obligated to serve them.49

At the end of the novel, Levin recognizes that he had been taught, through his early religious education that he came to reject in favour of science, to love his neighbour. ‘“Was it by reason”’, Levin asks, ‘“that I arrived at the idea that one must love one’s neighbor and not strangle him?”’.50 No, Levin concludes, he did not arrive at this principle through reason, which Spinoza (and Tolstoy tells us elsewhere in the novel, that Levin had been reading Spinoza!) refers to as the conatus essendi, the striving of each living thing to persist in its being, to be at the expense of, rather than for, other beings. In the passage from Otherwise than Being I discussed with reference to Karenin, Levinas refers to Spinoza’s notion of the conatus essendi.51 The conatus essendi, as both Levin and Levinas make clear, protects itself, at all costs, from vulnerability.

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‘The Russian novelists ceaselessly wonder,’ Levinas remarks in Ethics and Infinity, about ‘the philosophical problem understood as the meaning of the human, as the search for the famous “meaning of life” [sens de la vie]’.52 Levin, as he says at the end of Anna Karenina, finds this meaning not in faith, which he is still not sure he truly possesses, but rather in embracing the feeling of being a vulnerable I who, in striving for goodness, is loving towards his neighbour:

This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy, or suddenly illuminated things as I had dreamed. […] But faith—not faith—I don’t know what it is [A vera—ne vera—ia znaiu]. […] —but my life now, my whole life [vsia moia zhizn’], regardless of whatever may happen to me, each minute of it, is not only not meaningless [ne bessmyslenna], as it was before, but possesses the undoubted meaning [smysl’] of that goodness [dobra] I have the power to put into it!53

Are we not presented, at the end of Anna Karenina, with an anticipatory portrait of Levin as Levinas?

Thinking God on the Basis of Ethics: Tolstoy’s Resurrection

Anna Karenina concludes, as I have just proposed, with an anticipatory portrait of Levin as Levinas. Levin, like Levinas in his late work, approaches the meaning of God through ethical obligation rather than through faith.

Tolstoy’s late novel Resurrection (1899) is a rewriting both of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvogo doma, 1860–62), Tolstoy’s favourite work by Dostoevsky, and of The Brothers Karamazov, by which Tolstoy claims to have been bored and which he says he never finished and which lay by his bed when he left Iasnaia Poliana for the last time. Like Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, in Resurrection Tolstoy, or rather his protagonist Prince Dmitry Ivanich Nekhliudov, makes the case that ‘Each of us—before the faces of everyone and for everything—is responsible, but I more than all the others’.54 In his youth, Nekhliudov had seduced a servant, Katiusha Maslova, then in the employ of his aunt. Years later, as a member of the ruling aristocratic elite, Nekhliudov is a juror at a trial in which a prostitute

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is accused of poisoning a client. Nekhliudov is shocked to recognize the accused as the once innocent young woman he had seduced and who, as a consequence of that seduction, went on to become a prostitute. Nekhliudov sees Katiusha’s face and is overwhelmed with guilt and the betrayal of his own responsibility for her:

Yes, this was she. He now clearly saw in her face that strange, indescribable individuality which distinguishes every face from all others; something peculiar, all its own, not to be found anywhere else. In spite of the unhealthy pallor and the fullness of the face, it was there, this sweet particular individuality; on those lips, in the slight squint of her eyes, in the voice, particularly in the naïve smile and the expression of readiness on the face and figure.55

After the guilty verdict, which is a travesty, Nekhliudov is determined to follow Katiusha to Siberia and to devote himself to her and to the other prisoners, whom he comes to see more as victims of a cruel political system than as evil criminals.

Resurrection

Unlike Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy in Resurrection is not encumbered by insisting on a literal understanding of resurrection or of salvation. Nor is Tolstoy burdened by what Dostoevsky described as his own unquenchable ‘thirst to believe’.56 In Resurrection Tolstoy, in anticipation of the later work of Emmanuel Levinas, thinks God beginning with—or on the basis of—ethical obligation, outside the question of faith or belief. Tolstoy equates true religion with ethical responsibility, and he creates, in Resurrection, a work of literature that embodies what Tolstoy, in What is Art? (Chto takoe iskusstvo?, 1897), defines as ‘religious art’.57

Anna Karenina, written just before Tolstoy’s conversion to a religious consciousness (a process described in A Confession (Ispoved’, 1882)), is more artfully written than Resurrection and its characters are more three-dimensional. But redemption through literary greatness was not enough for the later Tolstoy, who came to believe that his own moral life had been corrupted by the thoughtless privilege that, once glimpsed and acknowledged, brought his final literary alter ego, Prince Dmitrii

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Ivanich Nekhliudov, to his knees. Tolstoy’s novel is titled Resurrection, but the resurrection of which he speaks is more precisely an awakening of the moral consciousness.

In What I Believe (V chem moia vera, published in 1884, four years before the publication of the final version of Resurrection), Tolstoy argues that, in the New Testament, ‘there are thirteen passages which are understood as being predictions by Christ of his resurrection,’ but, in truth, ‘[i]n none of these passages in the original does the word “resurrection” even occur.’ Of the two Greek verbs (ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω) that are conventionally translated as meaning ‘to resurrect,’ Tolstoy insists, ‘[o]ne of these words means “to upraise”; the other means “to awaken,” and, in the middle voice, “to wake up,” “to rouse oneself.” But neither the one nor the other can ever, under any circumstances, mean “to raise from the dead.”’ Tolstoy insists that ‘[o]f his own personal resurrection—strange as this may sound to people who have not themselves studied the Gospels—Christ never spoke at all!’.58 Tolstoy understands resurrection as moral regeneration. Sonship to God, for Tolstoy, is not so much a supernatural or miraculous fact of divine inheritance as it is to be morally awake, to love and to be responsible for your neighbour. To be the Messiah, or a Messiah, moreover, is not limited to Christ’s particular sonship for Tolstoy in What I Believe. In Matthew 16.20, Christ warned his disciples not to say that he, Jesus, was the Messiah. Why not? Because, for Tolstoy, it is the disciples’ own ‘sonship to God’ that allows them to participate, on a personal level, in messianic deliverance. When I, like Christ, take responsibility for others, I, too, am a ‘son of God’. I am a Messiah.

And here we note a link to a passage from the Talmudic treatise Sanhedrin, with which Tolstoy was familiar, a section of which is devoted to rabbinic discussions of the resurrection of the dead as well as to the meaning of messianic deliverance. Two years before he published What I Believe, Tolstoy studied Hebrew and the Talmud with the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Solomon Zalkind Minor. Let us attend to the remarks of Rav Nachman, a Talmudic scholar who died in the year 320 of the Common Era. Some of the rabbis cited in this section (98b) of Sanhedrin say that the name of the Messiah is Shiloh (meaning ‘a gift [shai] to him [l’o])’; some say his name is Chaninah (‘mercy’); still others say his name is Menachem the son of Chizkiah, for the name ‘Menachem’ means

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‘comforter’. Rav Nachman offers a different interpretation: ‘If he [the Messiah] is of the living, then he might well be (like) Me,’ or ‘he may in fact be me’ (kegon ’ana’). As Levinas remarks of this passage from the Talmud, Rav Nachman is saying ‘the Messiah is Myself [Moi]; to be Myself is to be the Messiah. […] The fact of not evading the burden imposed by the suffering of others’59 is what it means to be a self, to be Moi.

The Brothers Karamazov (published as a complete novel in 1881, the year of the author’s death) ends with the funeral of the young boy Iliushechka, attended by the boy’s young friends. Alesha Karamazov assures the boys that they will all ‘certainly’ see each other again in the life to come.60 Here we have a very different response to the meaning of resurrection than that of Tolstoy who, in conversation with his friend the philologist I. M. Ivakin, remarked at virtually the same moment (1881): ‘What is it to me if [Christ] is resurrected? If he was resurrected, then God bless him! The questions important to me are: What should I do? How should I live?’61

Tolstoy’s Rejection of Redemption through Faith

There is a stark difference, for the Tolstoy of Resurrection, between faith or belief, on the one hand, and ethical obligation, on the other. Tolstoy continually critiques the idea of the requirement or necessity of religious or dogmatic belief. Towards the end of the novel, Nekhliudov is staying in St Petersburg with an aunt. What has brought Nekhliudov to Petersburg was the opportunity it afforded him to speak with government officials who could alleviate the suffering of the convicts on whose behalf he is now tirelessly working. Urged by his aunt, Nekhliudov attends a dinner party at her stylish house one evening to hear the emotive words of the itinerant German preacher Kiesewetter, who speaks in English, immediately translated into Russian for his audience of aristocratic Petersburgers. Here we have a reprise of Tolstoy’s critique of the charlatan spiritualist Landau, whose mutterings in Anna Karenina spelled doom for Stiva Oblonskii’s plan to secure his sister Anna’s divorce from Karenin.

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Kiesewetter begins by telling the guests how terribly sinful they—and he—all are, how ‘no salvation’ is possible for any of them; ‘“we are all doomed to destruction”’. His tone then changes:

The orator suddenly uncovered his face, and smiled a very real-looking smile, such as actors express joy with, and began again in a sweet, gentle voice:

‘Yet there is a way to be saved. Here it is—a joyful, easy way. Salvation is in the blood shed for us by the only Son of God, who gave Himself up to torments for our sake. His sufferings, His blood, will save us. Brothers and sisters,’ he said, again with tears in his voice, ‘let us praise the Lord, who gave His only Son for the redemption of the world. His holy blood—’

Nekhlyudov felt so deeply disgusted that he rose silently, and, frowning and keeping back a groan of shame, he left on tiptoe and went to his room.62

For Nekhliudov to seek redemption or salvation as a goal for himself personally, Tolstoy constantly suggests, is a form of egoism, of selfishness. Kiesewetter, in contrast, preaches a praising of ‘the Lord, who gave His only Son for the redemption of the world’. Praise of God, with a tacit belief in Him, is enough for Kiesewetter. Here is a ‘joyful, easy’ way to salvation. True redemption or salvation, however, requires that I spend time in the filth of the prison system listening to those incarcerated there, and that I bear witness to injustice.

Towards the end of the novel, another foreigner—this time an Englishman rather than a German who speaks English—similarly emphasizes the importance of religious belief at the expense of ethical obligation. At this point in the novel, the reader has made the gruelling journey eastward with Nekhliudov across the vastness of Russia to the grim prison in Siberia to which the convicts have been sentenced to spend many years of their lives in exile. An Englishman who claims to be studying Russia’s carceral system asks Nekhliudov, a well-educated aristocrat whose English is excellent, to show him around the prison. It is only towards the end of their tour that the Englishman’s true motives are revealed.

Nekhliudov and the Englishman, accompanied by a prison official, pass through a corridor where they witness two prisoners urinating on the floor. They then enter the first of several wards. This first ward houses those sentenced to hard labour. Two of the prisoners are clearly

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very ill but they go untreated because ‘the infirmary was overfull’.63 The Englishman now announces that

he would like to say a few words to these people, and asked Nekhliudov to interpret. It turned out that besides studying the places of exile and the prisons of Siberia, the Englishman had another object in view, that of preaching salvation by faith and the Redemption. ‘Tell them,’ he said, ‘that Christ pitied and loved them and died for them. If they believe in this they will be saved.’ While he spoke all prisoners stood silent with their arms at their sides. ‘This book, tell them,’ he continued, ‘tells us all about it. Can any of them read?’64

Of course, most of the prisoners could not read. But what good would it have done them if they could? The Englishman was preaching ‘salvation by faith and the Redemption’. The miserable convicts will, he believes, be saved through their belief in salvation and redemption. Their belief will, apparently, make it unnecessary for those in power to confront their own betrayal of responsibility that has resulted in this display of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, in which ‘Everywhere men—cold, hungry, idle, diseased, degraded, and confined—were shown off like wild beasts’.65

The Religious Discourse Prior to Religious Discourse: ‘Here I Am’

Several chapters later, Nekhliudov comes upon a strange, nameless man who bears witness to the moral horrors of the prison system that had been glossed over by the evangelizing Englishman. Nekhliudov had originally encountered this strange man while traversing a broad river on a raft towards the end of his journey to the prison in Siberia. As they prepared to set off, the men on the raft all took off their hats and crossed themselves except for this strange, disheveled old man, who asked:

‘Who’s one to pray to?’ ‘To God of course,’ said the driver witheringly.‘And you just show me where He is––this God?’ […] ‘Where? In heaven of course.’‘And have you been up there?’‘Whether I’ve been or not, everyone knows that one must pray to God.’

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‘No man has ever seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him,’ said the old man in the same rapid manner, and with a stern frown. ‘It’s clear you are not a Christian, but a hole-worshipper. You pray to a hole,’ said the driver.66

And how does this declaring occur, we might ask? Is it by saying ‘I believe in God’? Apparently not, as in response to one of the passengers asking the nameless man what his ‘faith’ is, the stranger replies, ‘“I have no kind of faith, because I believe no one—no one but myself.”’67 Who is ‘myself’? What does it mean to be ‘me’? What does it mean to believe ‘myself’? This is the same ‘myself’ that Nekhliudov comes to realize, to his shame, he had abandoned in his youth and which he is determined to reclaim by devoting his life to Maslova and to so many of the other prisoners. As Levinas writes in his late essay ‘God and Philosophy’,

The sentence in which God comes to be involved in words is not ‘I believe in God.’ […] The religious discourse prior to all religious discourse is the ‘here I am’ said to the neighbor to whom I am given over, and in which I announce peace, that is, my responsibility for the other.

Levinas then quotes Isaiah 57:19: ‘I [the Infinite One/the Eternal, i.e. God] create the fruit of the lips [which say], “Peace, peace to him who is far off, and to him who is near,” says the Infinite One/the Eternal.’68 The infinite is in me, speaks through my lips when I say ‘Here I am’ before the face of the other in front of me (‘to him who is near’), and before all the other others (to those who are ‘far off’), for whom I am also responsible.

Let us now turn to the end of the novel, where we meet the strange, nameless man for the last time. He is in prison simply because he has no passport. We have earlier in the novel seen others imprisoned unjustly for the very same reason, and for unconscionably long periods of time. What the stranger bears witness to is ‘the Antichrist’ in the prison ‘who tortures men’. For see here, he says, how the Antichrist has ‘locked them in a cage, a whole army of them. Men should eat bread in the sweat of their brow. But he has locked them up with no work to do, and feeds them like swine, so that they should turn into beasts’.69

But how, the Englishman then asks, ‘“should one treat thieves and murderers now?”’ What are we to do with them? Nekhliudov translates this question from English into Russian for the strange old man:

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‘Tell him he should take the seal of Antichrist off from himself,’ the old man said, frowning sternly; ‘then he will know neither thieves nor murderers. Tell him so.’

‘He is crazy,’ said the Englishman, after Nekhlyudov had translated the old man’s words; and shrugging his shoulders he left the cell.70

The evangelizing Englishman fails to take account of his own responsibility for the fact that some are labelled thieves and murderers in prison. Instead he himself becomes an Antichrist, judging others while taking no responsibility for the prison system. In this sense, the Englishman, who professes Christianity, has not followed the teaching of Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov. Father Zosima insists that, while ‘each of us—before the faces of everyone and for everything—is responsible, but I more than all the others’, it is also true, at the same time, that

no one can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me.71

What is my role in the phenomenon of crime, and of punitive incarceration? Dostoevsky was haunted by the same question after his experience of serving four years in prison in Western Siberia. ‘How much youth’, the narrator of House of the Dead asks, ‘lay uselessly buried within those prison walls, what mighty powers were wasted here in vain!’. The narrator continues,

After all, one must tell the whole truth; those men were exceptional men. Perhaps they were the most gifted, the strongest of our people. But their energies were vainly wasted, wasted abnormally, unjustly, hopelessly. And who was to blame, whose fault was it (a kto vinovat)? And that’s just it, who was responsible (kto vinovat)?72

In his last novel, Tolstoy—through his protagonist Nekhliudov—says ‘Here I am’. I, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, am responsible, infinitely responsible for the other in front of me, and for all the other others. Here I am, Lev (Nikolaevich Tolstoy), creator of the fictional character Konstantin Dmitrievich Lev-in, and an anticipatory disciple of Emmanuel Lev-in-as.

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Notes

1 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillipe Nemo, trans. by Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 22.

2 On Levinas and Dostoevsky, see Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Alain Toumayan, ‘“I More than the Others,”: Dostoevsky and Levinas’, Yale French Studies, 104 (2004), 55–66, https://doi.org/10.2307/3182504; Peter Atterton, ‘Art, Religion, and Ethics Post Mortem Dei: Levinas and Dostoevsky,’ Levinas Studies: An Annual Review, 2 (2007), 105–32; Jacques Rolland, Dostoïevski: La question de l’Autre (Paris: Verdier, 1983); Val Vinokur, The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008); and Steven Shankman, Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). On Levinas and Tolstoy, see A. B. Hofmeyr, ‘Dying the Human Condition: Re-reading Ivan Ilyitch with Levinas’, The International Journal of the Humanities, 5, 2 January 2007, 129–36, https://doi.org/10.18848/1447-9508/CGP/v05i02/43482; Steven Shankman, ‘Levinas i Tolstoi: “Total’nost’ i beskonechnoe” kak “Voina i mir”’ [‘Levinas and Tolstoy: Totality and Infinity as War and Peace’], in Lev Tolstoi i mirovaia literature: Materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii 13, ed. by Galina Alekseeva (Yasnaya Polyana, Russia: Yasnaya Polyana, 2018), 97–105; and Steven Shankman, Turned Inside Out, pp. 11, 18, 101–02, 109, 112, 139 n9, 147 n47. Eva Marie Hirschmann says, ‘I am certain Levinas picked up a copy of War and Peace in his father’s bookstore [in Kovno, Lithuania]’. See Hirschmann, ‘Ethics and the Face in Levinas and Tolstoy,’ https://zauberblume.livejournal.com/2124.html [May 4 2007]).

3 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. by Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1968), p. 54 [Italics in the original]. Totalité et infini was first published in The Hague by Martinus Nijhoff in 1971.

4 Ibid.

5 William Large, Levinas’ “Totality and Infinity” (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 29.

6 Ibid., p. 30.

7 Ibid.

8 Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990), p. 8. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 23.

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9 See Levinas’s essay ‘La Signification et le sens’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 69 :2 (1964), 125–56. See also Levinas’s lecture on Bloch, delivered on May 7 1976 and included in Levinas’ Dieu, la mort et le temps, ed. by Jacques Rolland (Paris: Grasset, 1973), p. 118.

10 Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. by Alymer and Louise Maude, revised by George Gibian (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1966; revised 1996), p. 244.

11 Ibid., p. 253.

12 Ibid., p. 788.

13 Ibid., p. 790.

14 Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. 891. Cf. the words, recorded by Svetlana Alexievich, of a former Soviet prisoner in the Gulag who is imagining the thinking of those apparatchiks at whose hands he and so many others had suffered: ‘Each of them [was] thinking, “That isn’t me.” I wasn’t the one putting those people on the rack or blowing their brains out, that wasn’t me back there putting sharpened pencils through women’s nipples. It’s not me, it’s the system. Even Stalin... even he’d say, “I’m not the one who decides, it’s the Party.” He taught his son: You think I’m Stalin—you’re wrong! That’s Stalin! And he’d point to the portrait of himself hanging on the wall. Not at himself, but at his portrait […]. The flywheel turns, but there’s no one to blame’ (Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, trans. by Bela Shayevich (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 280).

15 Levinas, Totalité et infini, p. 28.

16 Levinas, Totalité et infini, p. 28; Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 39. Translation modified.

17 Tolstoy, War and Peace (Maudes’ translation), p. 794.

18 Ibid., p. 852.

19 Ibid., p. 853.

20 Ibid., p. 856.

21 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 54, p. 56, p. 59, p. 105.

22 Ibid., p. 896. In opposition to those who argue in favour of determinism, like Tolstoy himself (!) in War and Peace, Levinas insists that the I is independent and separated from history, from totality: ‘one may denounce as much as one likes its freedom as already enchained to an

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ignored determinism; ignorance is here a detachment, incomparable to the self-ignorance in which things [i.e. inanimate objects] lie. It is founded in the interiority of a psychism; it is positive in the enjoyment of itself. The imprisoned being, ignoring its prison, is at home with itself. Its power for illusion—if illusion there was—constitutes its separation’ (Totality and Infinity, p. 55; translation modified). Pierre’s experience of freedom in War and Peace, which Tolstoy narrates so vividly and convincingly, belies the author’s own theorizing in favour of determinism in War and Peace, especially in the Second Epilogue. In the Second Epilogue, Tolstoy sees history as predetermined and freedom as an illusion that is imagined both during and after the fact. For Levinas, I truly am free, as a separated being enjoying my existence, to do as I like. My spontaneous freedom, which truly is freedom, is, however, put to shame by the Other who, it turns out, truly invests my freedom.

23 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 55; Levinas, Totalité et infini, p. 47.

24 Tolstoy, War and Peace (Maudes’ translation), p. 901; the Russian is cited from L. N. Tolstoi, Voina i mir, 2 vols (Moscow: Astrel, 2010), II, p. 495.

25 Tolstoy, War and Peace (Maudes’ translation), p. 902. [Italics added].

26 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 111. [Italics added].

27 Tolstoy, War and Peace (Maudes’ translation), p. 937.

28 Ibid., p. 938.

29 Tolstoy, War and Peace (Pevear and Volokhonsky translation), pp. 1063–64, translating ‘No P’eru slishkom strashno bylo za sebia’ (Voina i mir, II, p. 552).

30 Tolstoy, War and Peace (Maudes’ translation), p. 940.

31 Ibid., p. 941.

32 Ibid., p. 977.

33 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 34–35; Levinas, Totalité et infini, p. 23.

34 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 79.

35 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. by Bettina Bergo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 91. The French is cited from De Dieu qui vient à l’idée (Paris: Vrin, 2004), first published in 1982.

36 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. by Alphonse Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 75.

1857. Levinas, Tolstoy, and Responsibility for the Other

37 See Anna Karenina: ‘Alexei Alexandrovich had grown up an orphan. There were two brothers. Their father they did not remember, and their mother died when Alexei Alexandrovich was ten years old. Their inheritance was small. His Uncle Karenin, an important official and once a favorite of the late emperor, had raised them.’ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. by Marian Schwartz (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 464. All translations from Anna Karenina will be from this version, which I have sometimes slightly adapted.

38 Ibid., p. 256.

39 Ibid., p. 467.

40 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 80.

41 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, pp. 133–34. The Russian is cited from L. N. Tolstoi, Anna Karenina (Moscow: Eksmo, 2011), p. 143.

42 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, pp. 256–57.

43 Ibid., p. 384.

44 Ibid., p. 396.

45 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 75.

46 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. 468.

47 Ibid., p. 669.

48 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 91.

49 Ibid., p. 713.

50 Ibid., p. 724. Translation modified.

51 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, p. 75.

52 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 22. The French is cited from Levinas, Éthique et infini (Paris: Fayard, 2012), originally published in French in 1982.

53 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, p. 742.

54 Fedor Dostoevskii, Brat’ia Karamazovy (Moscow: Eksmo, 2003), p. 297. My translation.

55 Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection, trans. by Louise Maude (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 35.

186 Reading Backwards: An Advance Retrospective on Russian Literature

56 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, ed. by Joseph Frank, Richard Goldstein, and Andrew MacAndrew (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 68; the Russian text is cited from Dostoevsky’s Pis’ma, ed. by A. S. Dolinin, 4 vols (Moscow and Leningrad: State Publishing House, 1928), I, p. 142.

57 Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 132.

58 Leo Tolstoy, A Confession, The Gospel in Brief, and What I Believe, trans. by Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), pp. 437–38.

59 Levinas, Difficult Freedom, p. 89; Levinas, Difficile liberté, p. 137. Rav Nachman’s comments are cited from the Schottenstein edition of Talmud Bavli, vol. 49, Tractate Sanhedrin, vol. III (New York: Mesorah Publications, third edition, 2008; rpt. 2010).

60 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by Constance Garnett, ed. by Susan McReynolds Oddo (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), p. 646.

61 Tolstoy, The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus, trans. Dustin Condren (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011), p. viii. ‘Christ denies the personal, the corporeal resurrection,’ Tolstoy writes in What I Believe (c. 1884), ‘but acknowledges a restoration of life in a man who merges his life into God’s’ (What I Believe, p. 435). ‘If, as the theologians teach, the basis of Christian faith lies in the resurrection of Christ,’ Tolstoy goes on to say (What I Believe, p. 436), ‘one would think that the least one could wish would be that Christ, knowing that he would rise again and that this would constitute the chief dogma of the Christian faith, should at least once say so clearly and definitely. But not only did he not say so definitely and clearly, he never once, not one single time in all the canonical Gospels, even mentioned it!’

62 Tolstoy, Resurrection, pp. 285–86. The Russian is cited from L. N. Tolstoi, Voskresenie (St Petersburg: Azbuka, 2012), p. 340.

63 Ibid., p. 474.

64 Tolstoy, Resurrection, p. 474; Voskresenie, p. 563.

65 Tolstoy, Resurrection, p. 475; Voskresenie, p. 542.

66 Tolstoy, Resurrection, p. 455.

67 Ibid., p. 456.

1877. Levinas, Tolstoy, and Responsibility for the Other

68 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 75. Translation of the Hebrew modified.

69 Tolstoy, Resurrection, p. 476.

70 Ibid.

71 Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, pp. 276–77.

72 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead, trans. by Constance Garnett (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), p. 302; Fedor Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz mertvogo doma (Moscow: Eksmo, 2005), p. 355. Translation modified.